National Framework and Preferred Practices for Palliative and Hospice Care

Background

Palliative and hospice care seek to prevent and relieve suffering and ensure the highest possible quality of life regardless of the age of the individual, stage of disease or need for other therapies. Palliative care is provided across a wide variety of settings and professional fields. It incorporates symptom control, including pain management, supportive care, respite care, rehabilitation, and terminal care. Over the past few years, demand for hospice and palliative care services has grown tremendously. In May 2004, the National Consensus Project—overseen by the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Care, Center to Advance Palliative Care, Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association, Last Acts Partnership, and National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization—reported on“ clinical guidelines” for palliative care. This project will utilize the NCP document as the starting point to endorse a national framework for palliative and hospice care and a set of preferred practices derived from that framework, with the ultimate goal of utilizing the framework and practices to endorse a set of voluntary consensus standards for palliative and hospice care quality measurement and reporting.

Scope of Activities

The project will:

Endorse a national framework for evaluating the quality of palliative and hospice care across all health settings.
Endorse a minimum set of preferred practices associated with high quality palliative and hospice care (“quality practices”) based on the framework. These practices may be overarching—i.e., covering all settings and providers—or specific.
Using the framework and practices, identify a strategy to identify existing measures for hospice and palliative care quality and/or identify measures that should be developed.
Identify high-priority research areas to advance palliative and hospice care quality.

Funding

Support for this project has been provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

For more information, contact Del Conyers at 202.783.1300 or info@qualityforum.org.